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Thursday – May 24, 2018

The Nipah virus has killed at least 10 people in the Indian state of Kerala. A rare, brain-damaging virus has killed at least 10 people in southern India, where medical crews are scrambling to manage the spread of the deadly disease and to minimize panic.Health officials said Tuesday that 10 people who were exposed to the Nipah virus and showed symptoms have died. Two others have tested positive for Nipah and are considered critically ill, and more than three dozen people have been put into quarantine since the outbreak began in the Indian state of Kerala, according to BBC News.This is a new situation for us; we have no prior experience in dealing with the Nipah virus, said K.K. Shailaja, health minister of the state, according to Reuters. We are hopeful we can put a stop to the outbreak. More >>

This morning CareZone, a platform for managing chronic illness and organizing health information, announced that it landed $50 million in a series D funding round led by NEA, with participation from McKesson Ventures, and Marc Benioff. This brings the companys total funding to $150 million. More >>

Physician practices are under constant pressure to improve value, but that can be difficult when there are so many moving parts: new quality reporting programs like MACRA, changing reimbursement models, and increased regulatory pressures, to name a few. Practice resources are stretchedand smaller practices may struggle to keep up.So whats a physician practice to do? For many, technology could be the answer to common pain points. Following are five common challenges physician practices faceand the technology-based solutions that could make a difference. More >>

Whether you call it cognitive computing, machine learning, deep learning or artificial intelligence (AI), the era of collaborative human-machine intelligence has begun, and the implications for healthcare are enormous.Without the leverage of AI, theres just simply no other way to turn the massive volumes of data coming from diverse and rapidly growing sources into the meaningful insights so critically needed to move into the new age of precision medicine and rise of healthcare consumerism. In fact, according to a PwC report, 54 percent of healthcare consumers worldwide are already open to receiving AI-enabled healthcare.Humans are critical to this next wave. The humans of healthcarephysicians, caregivers, researchers, administrators, policy makerswill increasingly rely on thinking machines to uncover patterns and More >>

At the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, automation and digitization are turning the job market upside down. Many fear that robots, A.I., and automation, in general, will take their jobs without alternatives. The same anxieties emerged in healthcare about artificial intelligence taking the place of radiologists, robots surpassing the skills of surgeons, or taking jobs in pharma.A renowned voice in tech, Kai-Fu Lee, founder of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures told CNBC that A.I. will be bigger than all other tech revolutions, and robots are likely to replace 50 percent of all jobs in the next decade. Silicon Valley-investor Vinod Khosla even said that machines will substitute 80 percent of doctors in the future in a healthcare scene driven by entrepreneurs, not medical professionals. In late 2016, Prof Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of neural networks, said that its quite obvious that we should stop training radiologists as image perception algorithms are very soon going to be demonstrably better than humans. Radiologists are, he said, the coyote already over the edge of the cliff who hasnt yet looked down. More >>

Wednesday – May 23, 2018

If you have a genetic mutation that increases your risk for a treatable medical condition, would you want to know? For many people the answer is yes. But typically such information has not been a part of routine primary care.For patients at Geisinger Health System, that could soon change. Starting in the next month or so, the Pennsylvania-based system will offer DNA sequencing to 1,000 patients, with the goal of eventually extending the offer to all 3 million Geisinger patients. More >>

As the healthcare sector continues to shift into value-based care and consumers become more involved in the care process, telemedicine and big data will continue to hold a crucial role in advancing patient care. Telemedicine has developed from a shiny new toy to the standard of doing care, said Lisa Schmitz Mazur, a partner at McDermott Will and Emery, who co-authored the book The Law of Digital Health withBernadette Broccolo, also a partner at the law firm. More >>

Security organizations just made it easier and more effective for hospitals to deploy and operate the dominant infosec frameworks. HITRUST has launched a certification program for the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. Through the HITRUST CSF Assurance Program and assessment scorecard for the NIST Framework, hospitals and health systems can deploy a more effective and efficient way to ensure security compliance. What that means: HITRUST and NIST essentially harmonized multiple industry-relevant statutory, regulatory and best practice requirements into a single framework that is both prescriptive and for healthcare organizations to get a handle on their security posture and work toward building a cybersecurity program that aligns with goals of the NIST Framework. More >>

How would you fancy the invisible healthcare system? The Medical Futurist believes that we should move in that direction. Do you remember the scene from the brilliant Luc Besson movie, The Fifth Element, where Gary Oldman as one of the leading antagonists, the evil Mr. Zorg, explains to his adversary, Father Vito Cornelius, why he aims at creating chaos? As an illustration of his monologue, he tosses a glass of water from the table smashing it to pieces. A small door opens, and dozens of little robots buzz around to sweep up the glass shards, to clean the floor and provide another glass of water as if nothing happened. Although the overall message of the scene goes entirely against the notion of providing care and healing, the idea that all the little helpers exclusively appear when they are needed, thats something to embrace. More >>

Precision medicine offers the potential for patients to receive medical care tailored to their needs. But ethical considerations must be top of mind for providers on the giving end of such treatments, says Paul Ford, director of the Center for Bioethics at Cleveland Clinic. More >>

As healthcare organizations pursue improvements in productivity and clinical outcomes, they're also increasingly turning to business intelligence (BI) systems and staff to provide the data and tools needed to achieve and sustain such gains. The problem is, many organizations' BI teams – tasked with a myriad of urgent and competing internal demands – often lack the experience, bandwidth and/or big-picture strategic and analytical skills needed to adequately respond to their organizations' heightened needs. In this guest post, Jim Buckheit, a California-based healthcare consultant, suggests focusing on four specific fundamentals to help create a well-functioning business intelligence team.

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That was the dilemma faced by a health maintenance organization (HMO) that had doubled its membership and found its BI team ill-equipped to respond to its growing technology needs. The HMO's experience in recognizing and addressing its BI issues provides a template other organizations can follow when confronted with similarly pressing BI demands.

The four ‘Rs' of quality BI performance

The greatest positive emerging from the HMO's BI issues was a wholesale reassessment of its BI team's role, responsibilities, responsiveness and resources. You can call these the four fundamental “Rs” of a well-functioning BI team performance:

The 2018 Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) by Verizon has revealed that ransomware is a growing problem. In the 2014 DBIR report, ransomware ranked 22nd on the list of most common malware threats in data breach cases; in 2016, it jumped up to the fifth; and now, ransomware tops the list. More >>

HIPAA compliance is a journey, not a destination. For home health agencies in particular, this journey presents a number of unique obstacles and challenges along the way. In our Home Health & HIPAA guide, we explore five of the most common HIPAA compliance challenges faced by home health providers, and offer some practical solutions for overcoming them. More >>

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